


Carmilla Revised

by GohoDoji



Category: Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 終わりのセラフ | Owari no Seraph | Seraph of the End
Genre: M/M, mikayuu
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 07:10:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17402357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GohoDoji/pseuds/GohoDoji
Summary: Hello! Thank you for taking a look at this piece. I'm a fan of ONS and Mikayuu as well as a Victorian vampire novel with lesbian undertones called Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. One thing I don't like about Carmilla is the way it feels like queerness is ultimately equated with sin and death. This makes some sense from the time, as being openly in a queer relationship could lead to being ostracized, imprisoned, or worse, depending on your location. Heterosexual relations are explored through vampirism in Dracula, too,  and Carmilla was an influence on that work. I am setting out to write a response text. I won't be building Mika and Yuu a fantasy paradise, however. Jean Rhys set out to respond to issues around colonialism in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, a beautiful novel, resulted in which the creole "wife in the attic" was humanized. I'm hoping to vindicate Carmilla in the form of Mika/Mikhail (albeit with questionable skill). I have ditched Le Fanu's Styrian countryside for the Russian provinces.





	1. Forward & Prologue

Forward, Addressed to Dr. von H-, Anthropologist and Psychologist

Esteemed Sir,

It was with no little interest that I read your letter which I received five weeks ago, that is April 30th, however as things were unusually busy here in our quiet little hamlet I was not able to examine it at length for several days. The timing was extraordinary in that the trouble that occured here all those years ago had, as it seems annually to do, just resurfaced for reexamination in my mind (I should say in our minds). I am not in the practice of writing often as I have no family living and raised as I was in such a solitary place I have no boyhood friends. The going was slow at first but as I recalled more and more of the things that happened then I found my words flowing likewise more and more freely. You will find the full account of all that occured in the enclosed manuscript; I only hope that it will prove half as interesting as the tall tales (enlivened and enriched, no doubt, by lively peasants’ imaginations!) which must have reached your ears and prompted you to write to me. I ought not to have written peasants… we are all comrades now. At any rate, I hope what information I can furnish may be of some small use to your studies. 

There are a lot of colorful stories told by the locals which might interest both the folklorist and the occultist alike; if your work ever brings you near this remote corner of the world perhaps you will consent to stay as a guest and transcribe some of them. I won’t make a wager as to the truthfulness behind them. I suppose, given the current state of things, your venturing to our little village is out of the question. As much as the world has changed since the events I’ve described, Ableukovskoye, skirted by dark pines and watched over by the grey Urals, seems to stand still. 

With warm regards,

Yuri Eduardovich Asheton 

 

Prologue: My History Up Until “the Troubles”

I am English, although I have never seen the shores of that isle in my life. My father, after a successful career in the navy of that nation, obtained an offer of employment as a naval engineer for the Russian Imperial fleet. He spent the next several years of his life in helping to build up a force broken almost beyond repair in the Crimean war. An admiral who took a liking to him acted as a sort of social sponsor and he made acquaintances among, if not the most brilliant members of Petersburg society, at least in the respectable milieu of comfortably living civil servants and retired officers.

He was just past forty when he met the niece of a prominent politician named Ableukov (an old protege of the Czar-Liberator) through the auspices of his sponsor’s wife. Having caused her mother to despair of ever seeing her marry and produce grandchildren by wasting away her youth in habitual convalescence she had gradually grown stronger until all at once my grandmother (for Mlle Ableukova was my mother) determined to see her dreams brought to fruition after all and hastened to bring the girl to her brother in law’s house with the object of launching her into society from that venerable domicile. Senator Ableukov in fact had a son of his own, however the boy was too young for my mother (now in her late twenties) and I doubt even had their ages been closer that old Ableukov would have willing united his child to the fortuneless orphan of his reprobate bother. The courting of his niece by a naturalized westerner with a decent income and respectable professional associations could hardly be objected to for the simple fact that the girl had no money whatsoever; what’s more she was quite plain and getting too old. I was never sure what caused the one to pursue the other, could it have been a premonition of the reversal to come? No, no one could have known what was to follow; perhaps father hoped to receive some modest legacy at a later date and to further advance himself on the strength of his uncle in laws name. As far as the Senator was concerned the fine boy he was bringing up (alone, his wife had left him) would do more than well enough for the continuation of his house and he did not challenge his sister in law when she pressed her daughter towards the match. 

Please do not take me for unfilial because I say that my mother was not pretty. I loved her and I love her memory still. The kind words and gentle attentions of that pure hearted woman grieve me to remember now that I am divided from them by the cold earth of the grave and more. She did have long, dark, almost asiatic hair which recalled portraits of dead Ableukov grande dames. Their skin is a glowing alabaster, however hers was not lit by the same light. If she had been healthy she might have approached a certain type which the famed Princess Yusupova is said to exemplify. 

My parents were married late in the year of the coronation and took a flat of seven fine rooms occupying the entire third floor of a house on R- Prospect. I, the only child of their union,was born in the first year of this century (mother had had difficulty twice before and my birth I am told was almost a miracle). I grew up quite happy with only two real sorrows: my mother was often ill, and my father was perpetually at his offices. I had a doting nurse, Katya, and our cook was inclined to ply me with sweets. I ought to have lived on thus quite happily but events took a swift turn for our little family. We have often since thought how lucky I was to get out of Petersburg then. 

The war against Japan decimated the navy and a shocking case of patricide of which you may have heard (even amongst the great tumult of the times) left us rich but also compelled our reclusion from society: young Ableukov, by that time a student and in league with the most zealous sects of revolutionaries, blew up his father by planting a bomb in his study. Father later quipped (in poor taste) that he thought the Senator must have rejoiced to die in a like manner to his master. Of course the younger Ableukov had forfeited his inheritance and the house on N- Boulevard, the dacha near Peterhof, and ancient, vast Ableukovskoye devolved upon my parents. With no employment to deter my father and the political situation volatile they decided to journey some 1,600 kilometres east to the family’s seat at the foot of the Urals. They ought to have gone to mourn quietly at Peterhof; my mother, never in good health and shaken by the murder of her uncle and arrest of her cousin, died on the journey and was buried on the estate over which she was to have been mistress. 

The place had been well kept up by the aging steward who seemed, I remember through the veil of my own grief, to be near the point of apoplexy when he was dealt the triple blow of learning of the fates of the Senator, the young master, and my mother (whom he had known in her earliest childhood) upon our arrival. The old man drained the well of his own fortitude seeing to everything that had to be done immediately to accommodate both the living and the dead. Once my mother was buried and my father recovered from the shock of the great changes that had come into his life in such quick succession he took over management of the place. The assuming by my father of the role of lord of the manor (to use an Anglicism) occurred under the darkest of circumstances and the peasant women used to remark when they thought I was out of earshot that like the old superstition about brides who arrived behind a coffin so too were masters who arrived under such conditions bound to be cursed. 

The truth is that my clearest memory of my mother’s face is from her wake in the great drawing room at Ableukovskoye. The curtains of green velvet were drawn back to reveal the wide, deserted park and the dark forests of pine beyond and the moonlight poured in upon her catafalque. I sat wide awake in the first row in an armchair brought from the dining room with father beside me and the household servants who, all strange to me, seemed an audience to our private tragedy ranged behind us. We do not keep so large a staff now. The night was warm and the great stone house held heat remarkably well so the windows were all cast open. Over the open coffin was draped a great bolt of lace which rustled with the cool breezes that drifted in off the mountains. I do not know how many hours I sat facing mother but I could hear the uniform snoring of the old housekeeper thrumming quietly behind me when a more powerful and icy gust flapped the curtains and actually stirred the veil over the coffin enough that it slid down to the floor, eliciting a gasp from a kitchen maid and waking the housekeeper who gave a startled and irritating cry. 

Twenty four hours? Two days? I am not sure how long it was since I had last seen her before the winds cast aside her shroud. The trip from Petersburg and the death that occured during it seem vague to my memory with regards to the movement of time. She had been complaining of feeling unwell through most of the journey and I suppose father and Katya assumed her habitual sicklyness was only aggravated a little by the rigors of travel. Pale, with beads of perspiration on her brow, she coughed more often and more violently than usual throughout that day. When we stopped at a little station somewhere after K- I accompanied her out onto the platform to get fresh air, silently hoping the effort at exertion was a good sign. In fact it was too much for her and she collapsed coughing and wheezing onto a bench almost immediately. She held a pearl white kerchief to her mouth but dropped it with the succeeding spasm. When I picked it up, it was speckled a beautiful deep red which I didn't quite comprehend; I remember thinking it looked like the petals of a rose hidden in the folded fabric. Father and Katya helped her up. I hid the strangely decorated kerchief in my breast pocket. 

Back on the train my mother seemed a little better. She felt about her coat for the kerchief and seeing her mistress missing it Katya gave her a plain one of her own. After having me say my evening prayers a few hours later mother laid her head back against the seat of our compartment. She never opened her eyes again and when I half awoke in the middle of the night Katya was carrying me to an empty compartment further down the train car. I asked for an explanation but she put her hand over my mouth. “Shh, Yura, you’ll wake her. Let’s move away so she can rest.” Her voice must have quavered, but in my childish drowsiness I sensed nothing amiss. Nestled into the bed she made for me on the long seat of the new compartment, I drifted off with my hand pressed to my breast where the red petals were hidden. When I awoke to the clarity of the cold morning light on my face my nurse was asleep in the same corner of the compartment that my mother had lain back in two doors down; that is to say in my child's mind she sat where my mother ought to have been. I knew by the sign of this substitution that she was dead and I resolved never to surrender the kerchief with it’s ruby petals; even after I understood the source of it’s pattern I kept it as a talisman for many years. I no longer carry it on my person, but it is still in a pretty lacquered box in this house. The white cambric is but a little yellowed now, like rich cream, but the red spots of that kerchief have not faded.

Let us say something like two days had passed. For a child who has never spent any period longer than the school day away from his mother, that is a very long time. I had not seen her since she went to sleep in the corner of our compartment. A few hours after I awoke father joined us two doors down, sitting silently beside Katya as he had been sitting beside my mother the previous evening. I suppose that everything was arrange to prevent my seeing the body. The truth is I was, at the bottom, anxious to see it. I was a child, and I could not fully fathom death, but I was anxious my mother not be left alone in her new state. I was also petrified to break the silence in our compartment, so I sat in worry for what seemed like an eternity until I passed into a feverish sleep, that sleep which seems to have lasted until I stepped off the train in the village. Father and I were never behind the coffin, though, at least not immediately behind it. I believe we waited with Katya in some eatery in the village while my mother was disembarked and then we continued on our last leg after she had been put in the undertakers cart and preceded us, as was fitting for the daughter and heiress of the house, to Ableukovskoye. I had not caught even a glimpse of her coffin until I was led into the drawing room that evening and saw it, as I said, draped so that her person was obscured. I despaired of seeing her, of making sure she was alright and where she ought to be. 

When the shroud fell I almost lept up and in a few quick strides was lifting it from the floor. Her hair, dark and rich, lay prettily over the shoulders of her white linen shift which I remember looked courser than her own French nightgowns. Her eyes were closed and her face was calm, as in sleep, yet as I had never seen her lie sleeping before (plagued as she was by ill health throughout all my short life). Her hands lay loosely clasped around a plain wooden cross. Small, clustered flowers of purple and white lay beneath her head and the moon leant a lustre to her skin that showed her to be the true daughter of the great ladies looking down from the surrounding walls, although the peasants in the village who had dressed her had done so in keeping with their own rustic ways. I had never seen her so luminous in life and I am glad to have seen her dead, yet finally without sickness, to have that lovely image of her as the last and strongest in my memory. Fairer she seemed than she ever had in life, yet truly she was dead. Even now, my sleep has never been disturbed by any doubt of that. Assured that she was there as she should be, I covered her again (I suppose no one had the heart to pull me from the task). I turned and looked out the window which as I said gave a broad and high view of the park below. Facing me, some twelve feet above the ground, was a lovely figure clad in silver moonbeams. 

I guessed immediately that he, or it, must be an angel to stand where there was no footing and by another sign felt this confirmed: rather than obscure the moonlight the figure cast no shadow but allowed the light to pass through itself upon my mother. The moment when we looked upon one another seemed, most of all of that long night, outside of time. I did not believe this angel had come to take my mother off (as I said, I knew she was dead, and let me say here absent, when I saw her face unveiled) but I supposed that she had sent it back to reassure me. I could not make out the lines of that face quite clearly, yet I sensed a strange loneliness, a yearning, which chilled me (I cannot explain how this was so, yet I attest here that it was). I did not think, being a child, but rather felt that to be such a one as crosses the threshold of life must mean to exist between too and fro, upon the very cusp of night. My heart truly ached in sorrow for the first time in my young life (for though I had been anxious and numb by turns yet I hadn’t yet felt the full grief of my mother’s passing). I wondered why it would not come in, yet I also felt that it could not. I supposed that it was not within its orders to venture further than the window to glance upon me and then to go back to my mother and say “he is well, he is in the house of your fathers, be at peace” yet I yearned to efface a little of this being’s loneliness and I smiled through the feeling of it’s pain as I turned more fully to face the window. 

“Come in” said I, an offering of life uttered in that silent death chamber. Quickly, almost in the same instant, Marfa, an old servant woman, pulled me roughly back and brought me to sit on her broad knees in the row behind my father. She whispered a prayer, I suppose, for my dead mother. When I looked again toward the window the figure had gone.


	2. An Uninvited Guest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yura is seventeen, and a stranger arrives under dramatic circumstances at isolated Ableukovskoye.

An Unexpected Guest

It was late in the summer of my 17th year. I was walking in the early evening with my tutor Stepan Vasilievich on the bluff above the turn of the drive into the estate from the main road when we heard faintly the thudding of approaching horses across the waving fields of browning millet. Turning to the east we saw a carriage drawn by three black horses harnessed abreast and galloping at breakneck speed. Quick she glided through the fields and the thundering of the horses hooves upon the road grew louder. Stepan Vasilievich squinted behind his thick glasses in the direction of the droshky. “What an equipage. The style of that carriage looks like something from the time of Alexander le premier.... if they keep up at that speed that antique will break apart!”.

The carriage was approaching the foot of the bluff and I was beginning to share my tutor’s disbelief. At the turn just at the foot of the bluff where we stood the grade of the road drops quickly. It is a dangerous spot for strangers because it was impossible to see until you were right upon it. It was clear that the vehicle was not slowing down- a panoply of splintered wood and heaving, bloodied flesh, human and equine, appeared before my mind. “Stepan Vasilievich, we must stop them!” I shouted, already running down to the road. I yelled and waved my hands as my companion wheezed several paces behind me. I could gained level ground and could make out the face of the coachman. To my surprise his expression was a complete blank. I ran as fast as I could along the road in the direction of these ill fated strangers. The coachman gave no sign of slowing or even any acknowledgment; how could I force him to take notice? I hesitated less than a second and, ripping the little cloth purse out from my neck and beneath my shirt, I unfurled my mother’s talisman and waved the bloodstained kerchief above my head frantically. I was perhaps thirty feet ahead of the deadly curve and in a few seconds the carriage was within an instant of passing me. In what must have been two seconds the coachman suddenly did take notice and his ashen face, formerly without animation, turned upon me (or more truthfully upon my kerchief) and his look changed to one of horror, almost even (strange to say) of anger. He must, I believe, have thought himself about to run me down as he violently pulled at the reigns and swerved far to the other side of the road. The carriage was past me then and thundered around the foot of the hill. Just as Stepan Vasilievich reached me I turned and heard the screams of the horse and a great crash. My stomach turned and I felt nausea rise in my throat as I quickly ran back in the direction I had come and turned the bend.

The tableau I had foreseen had not come to pass. The carriage was overturned and the horses lay in confusion but seemed more disconcerted than anything, I could not tell yet if any persons were injured. The carriage door was open and I could see a man standing up in it and trying to pull something up. Fearing that it might be another passenger who had been hurt I thrust my kerchief into Stepan Vasilievich’s hand and ran up. The man turned as I approached and his look of anxiety seemed to lessen. “The coachman has been knocked unconscious, I fear!” he shouted in French, and sure enough I saw the ashen faced man lying prostrate beside his toppled beasts. “My master, I cannot lift him out!”.

My tutor arrived panting beside me. “Yura, you help him. I’ll check on the condition of the coachman.” I nodded and clambered up onto the carriage’s side. In the compartment below I could make out a golden haired youth, richly dressed and lying across the opposite door at the feet of (I presumed) his servant or attendant. How pale he looked, like stone illuminated only by moonlight. I was gripped by a paroxysm of fear that for this unknown it was already too late. His eyes opened, however, and he squinted up at me. 

In perfect French: “Herr Woland, who is that? I feel dizzy-”

I responded, somewhat faltering, in the same tongue: “My name is Yuri Eduardovich, and you are at Ableukovskoye. Let me help you up” and I reached a hand down into the compartment. “Can you rise?”

“Yura! I’ve roused the coachman. How’s the other?”

“I’m not sure if he can move-”

“I’f he can’t move his legs we must leave him where he is and get the doctor!”

“Please, I’m not paralyzed, only weak…” I looked back down into the compartment. The boy was raising himself up onto one arm with what appeared to be considerable effort. Woland crouched down to lift him up and relieve him. 

“Herr Woland?” (he nodded his confirmation) “Lift him up to me and I will pull him out, if you are certain it is safe to move him.” I crouched down and braced myself to pull the boy up as his servant helped him to stand. He held up his arms to me like a child yet with an expression of uncertainty. “Grab my neck- it’ll be easier to pull you than by your hands”. He hesitated for a moment as I leaned towards him, then acquiesced. I hoisted him out and set him down again so he was sitting on the edge of the carriage. Jumping down, I pulled him after me into my arms and then helped him walk to a large stone by the roadside (which I left him leaned against) at which time a peasant driving an oxcart rounded that same bend. He willingly consented to go to the house to fetch men to right the carriage. When he left, turning from his original path towards Ableukovskoye, Herr Woland had scrambled out and off of the carriage and the newly conscious coachman, who he addressed as X, was running his hands over the legs and torsos of his horses, performing a preliminary inspection before they could be stood up again. 

In about half an hour my father appeared in the box of a farm cart with several sturdy workmen and Marfa, who I had not mentioned is skilled in various forms of care and healing including midwifery, bone setting, and the general treatment of common maladies. The men clambered down with ropes and approached the carriage and coachman to aid in righting both the drozky and troika. Father came up to where I stood beside the reclining youth and his attendant. 

“Young man, I am the master of this place, and called Asheton. I hope you will consent to rest at Ableukovskoye, it is only a little ways past that hill.” 

The boy, or perhaps I should say youth, for he seemed my age, looked upon my father as though without comprehension.

“I am Monsieur Asheton. This is my son, Yuri Eduardovich. We will take you up to the house to rest.” I suppose he thought the young man was dazed from his accident. 

“You are master here? But you’re a foreigner?” He spoke as though utterly bewildered at the idea of a westerner as anything other than merchant or tutor, but with such clear surprise and no evident disdain that I wondered what isolated old hamlet he could have grown up in, gentlemen though he evidently was, to be so shocked. 

“Well, my wife was Russian. Please allow us to offer you are hospitality, votre excellence-” here he paused, still not knowing the name of our guest. As he supplied none, father ventured no further introductions of his own and went to attend to the others.

I stooped to pick him up to bring him to the buggy which had subsequently arrived but he protested that he could walk if I’d lend him an arm. In the end we progressed with his arm about my shoulders and mine steadying him as best I could about the waist. Just before we got to the buggy he stumbled and braced him with my other arm, too, he would have fallen. I held him up, but unsure he could manage I did not let go of him. 

“Yuri Eduardovich… I’m terribly sorry. I suppose I was more shaken by the crash than I knew.” his mouth was close by my ear as he leaned into me, and I could feel his breath, warm and rapid, on my neck. It was clear he really had exerted himself. 

“Only promise me you won’t press yourself further; rely on me to get you to the house so you can truly recuperate. Can you agree?” I recalled that I still didn’t know my new friend’s name.

“Yes, I ought to have listened before.” He then allowed me to lift him into the box and I took up the reigns to drive home. Eyes closed, my poor friend seemed close to swooning. Fearful he might tumble out, I put one arm around his back, the old mare needing little guidance on so familiar a path. 

“Yuri Eduardovich? May I call you Yura? Isn’t that what your manservant called you?”

I reddened a little. “Only on the condition that you tell me how I am to address you in return. Also Stepan Vasilievich is my tutor, not a servant.”

He was silent and for a moment I thought either I had in some way offended him or he had fallen asleep. Just when I was about to repeat myself he replied: “I was christened Mikhail. My nurse called me Misha, and so shall you.” 

“Alright then; Misha. Here we are, welcome to Ableukovskoye!” We rode through the main gate of the courtyard, already calling each other by diminutives, yet I knew neither his family nor even his patronymic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The summer of 1917 sits between the February Revolution which unseated the three hundred year old Romanov dynasty (proceeded by eight hundred years of more fragmented rule in Moscow and Kiev by the Rurikovichi) and the October Revolution, or Bolshevik revolution, which toppled the ill fated provisional government and sparked six years of civil war between the "Reds" and the "Whites" (with both democratic and monarchist factions within the latter group). Unlike the prologue, this chapter contains no historical mentions. We shall see if events on the national stage have foil or mirror at Ableukovskoye...

**Author's Note:**

> The Asheton's move to Ableukovskoye following the end of the Russo-Japanese war and amid the tensions that would lead to the 1905 revolution.


End file.
